According to a recent online article on the New York Amsterdam News website, the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission has officially designated Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island as a historic landmark. It is noted for housing one of the city’s only existing cemeteries built by and for Black New Yorkers.
The memorial park, founded in 1933 by a Harlem funeral director named Rodney Dade, covers nearly 15 acres along Amboy Road in Oakwood Heights, Staten Island.
The park’s cemetery was built in 1935 and is still an active burial site. There are an estimated 60,000 interments of Black New Yorkers in the park’s cemetery, including jazz singers Mamie Smith and Rosa Henderson, jazz trumpeter Tommy Ladnier, and baseball players King Solomon “Sol” White and Elias “Country” Brown.
The Staten Island Museum and the Staten Island Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (SIAAHGS) currently have free digitized archives of the people buried at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park. The burial archives can be found at: archive.org/details/frederickdouglassmemorialpark
